


The Champion's Lover

by dreadwulf



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Doing terrible things to Fenris, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-16
Updated: 2013-06-16
Packaged: 2017-12-15 05:11:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/845696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadwulf/pseuds/dreadwulf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody knows the real story of how the Arishok was defeated, and what role the Champion's Lover had to play in the fate of Kirkwall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Champion's Lover

She heard the stories everywhere. In taverns like this, on the streets, in the market, even on her own bloody ship. Since the war had broken out, it seemed all of Thedas had developed an interest in the backwater city of Kirkwall and its Champion, and storytellers everywhere were polishing their own version of the tale.  
  
They were always a little different - sometimes the Champion blew up the Chantry personally, sometimes he merely helped. Some tales claimed he was inside the Chantry and perished in the fire. Details on the Champion himself also varied. In some tales he was a mage himself, a blood mage even, while others made him a muscular warrior seven feet tall with a blade nearly as tall as he was. He had black hair, maybe he had a beard, or perhaps he was bald. Sometimes he was actually a she.  
  
Tonight’s expert on all things Champion-related - an Antivan trader sitting at the head of a table of sailors - was telling of the sacking of Kirkwall by the Arishok and his Qunari troops, and how the Champion defeated him in single combat.  
  
“Gentlemen, you have never heard the real tale of the Champion of Kirkwall, the one that only I know.” The trader, who Isabela did not recognize, looked unduly proud of himself for this revelation. “The truth is, he didn’t fight the Arishok to save the city. Wouldn’t you know, it was all over a woman! The Qunari wanted to carry her off with them on their ships, and the Champion said no. He dueled the Arishok in single combat, not for the city, and not for glory, but to rescue the woman he loved.”  
  
The sailors murmured in agreement; yes, that made sense. Who here _hadn’t_ gotten themselves into a fight over a girl? The man went on to describe the duel in great (imagined) detail, and the wild woman with the golden eyes emptied her pint, slapped it down on the bar, and left in a huff.

They never got it quite right. No one did.  
  
The Antivan was closer than most - that’s what made it maddening. There **was** a woman, as Isabela knew all too well. But the Champion didn’t fight the Arishok for her.  
  
The Champion didn’t fight the Arishok at all.

*************************

Yes, there was a woman. That bit was true enough. There was a woman,  and there was a book, and the invaders who wanted it back. When they grew tired of waiting for their book, they lit the city on fire. And she brought back the book and faced the music.  
  
In truth, she hadn’t come back to save the city or because it was the right thing to do.  She brought the book back because her companions, her _friends_ , had stayed behind to fight the Qunari and an annoying little splinter of guilt had wormed its way under her skin and gotten into her blood. She had even smuggled herself onto a ship and prepared to sail away, but found she could no longer look at the damned book without that terrible guilt bubbling up in her guts.  
  
So, yes, she went back.  
  
But her lover had not fought the Qunari for her. When she walked into the Keep and presented the Qunari with their relic, Hawke had embraced her gratefully. Yet when the Arishok demanded to take her with them, he didn’t do a damned thing. He let the Qunari soldiers drag her away from him, watching with a vaguely apologetic sort of helplessness. The Qunari had promised to leave Kirkwall so long as they could take her with them, and Hawke had always been a goody-two-shoes, keep the peace sort of guy. To make certain they left the city, he was ready to let them have her.  
  
Before they could take her away, another of Isabela’s companions had stepped forward and spoke to the gathered Qunari in the language of their Qun. Their leader listened, looming over him, and answered him back in his booming voice, gesturing to Isabela emphatically. Fenris did not gesture or raise his voice. He talked to the Arishok calmly and reasonably.  
  
Finally the Arishok grunted, and switched back to the Common tongue. “All right, little elf. If you seek an honorable death I will grant it to you.”  
  
The Arishok threw off the more decorative elements of his armor with the aid of his attendants, and Fenris slowly drew his sword.  
  
Isabela tried in earnest now to slip out of the Qunari soldiers’ grasp, but they held her fast. She had no idea what Fenris and the Arishok had agreed to, but she wanted no part of it. _Bloody fucking sodded rotting Qunari bastards. If I could just draw one of my blades…_  
  
Meanwhile Hawke broke out of the crowd of nobles and grabbed the elf’s arm firmly, shouting at him loudly enough that Isabela could hear him perfectly. “You wanna run this plan by me first?!”  
  
“Plans are your approach. I mean to fight him.” Fenris explained, walking to the center of the throne room. “The Qun allows a worthy opponent to duel the Arishok, so long as it is single combat and to the death.”  
  
Hawke followed behind him, grimacing. “If anyone should duel the gigantic bastard in charge, it should be me. I brought us here. I helped her get the book, for Maker’s sake.”  
  
Fenris held his ground, with his usual measure of disdain. “ **You** are no warrior. You can manage against fools and templars, but the Qunari live for battle and the Arishok is their best. Your knife tricks and smoke bombs will do nothing against him.”  
  
“You can do better?” the human asked skeptically.  
  
The elf nodded. “I was made for this,” he answered flatly.  
  
It was a fact. He was a living weapon, with lyrium imbued into his skin to grant him strength, speed, and strange abilities. He had fought Qunari long before he came to Kirkwall, and knew more about them than anyone else present. If anyone could fight the Arishok, it would be Fenris.  
  
Hawke stroked his beard and looked at Isabela across the room, where she was held down by two Qunari soldiers twice her size. “What happens if you win?”  
  
“Isabela is free to go. And I imagine the Qunari would leave peacefully with their Relic.” He shrugged in response to Hawke’s unspoken follow-up question. “If I lose, you will be no worse off than before.”  
  
 _Except that you’ll be dead,_ Isabela finished for him. _And I’ll still be dragged to Seheron. I hate this plan. This is a stupid plan. Don’t let him do it, Hawke._  
  
Instead, Hawke nodded shortly. “Do it. I’ll work out something to try if this doesn’t work.”  
  
So Hawke left him alone at the center of the room and the Qunari warriors encircled him, weapons drawn, so that there would be no escape, and no backing out now. The enormous Qunari leader broke through the circle with a strange eagerness that he had never shown before in Kirkwall. Isabela could do nothing. She pulled ineffectively against her captors as Fenris walked into the center of the throne room, alone with his sword.  
  
“You sodding moron!” she spat at him angrily. “He’ll tear you to pieces!”  
  
Fenris looked at her only briefly. He seemed vaguely irritated at her lack of confidence in him. Then his attention shifted fully to the Arishok, and his battle-focus took hold. Murmurs raised throughout the hall as his brands activated, the eerie blue lyrium glow covering him from head to foot. The nobles herded into the Keep had never seen such a display, were not certain whether to call it magic or demon possession, did not know who to fear more in this moment, Fenris or the Arishok, regardless of who had beheaded their Viscount.  
  
The size difference between the two figures was nearly comical. Though tall for an elf, Fenris resembled only an average-sized human, and an uncommonly slender one at that. His spindly limbs seemed especially breakable before the might of the Arishok, whose right thigh was wider across than Fenris’s waist. The Qunari stood nearly twice his height, looming over him with tremendously broad shoulders and arms gnarled with huge grey muscles. He looked as though he could break the elf across his knee at any moment.  
  
The Arishok swung his enormous blade over his shoulder, its weight made obvious by the resounding crash it made when it hit the floor where the elf had stood merely a moment before. The finely polished stone crumbled beneath the blow, leaving a small crater. Seemingly without effort the Arishok freed his weapon from the dent in the floor and hoisted it into the air again, swinging it in a huge arc around him, hard enough to create a breeze.  
  
Fenris moved again, ducking beneath the Arishok’s blow, so that the blade crashed into a stone pillar and stuck there, six inches deep. He moved in hoping to strike before the Arishok could free his weapon, but the tremendous strength of the Qunari leader pulled it out of the stone in no time at all. He parried the elf’s greatsword with his much larger blade, and Fenris was forced to withdraw.  
  
The Arishok stood tall again, flicking his enormous sword through the air to shake free the last bits of crumbled stone. The blows had not marred the weapon at all, so strong was its metal and so fine its forging. It must have been far stronger than any weapon you could find in Kirkwall.  
  
Fenris stayed just ahead of the Arishok’s attacks, dodging a swipe aimed across his chest and a stab to his unhelmeted head. He seemed to be looking for an opening, but finding none. His opponent’s movements were economical and without waste, as the Qun demanded of him, leaving no weaknesses to attack.  
  
If the elf had hoped to tire the Qunari, this too appeared hopeless. The Arishok, though slower than the elf to begin with, seemed to possess nearly boundless energies. The crushing swings of his weapon did not slow with time.  
  
The elf had speed on his side, and more so when his lyrium brands flared and turned him into a lethal glowing blur. Whenever he attempted an attack at the Arishok, however, he was parried at every turn, no matter how fast his strike. Blocked, his greatsword came nowhere near the body of the Qunari and neither could he reach his gauntlets near enough to phase through his armor.  
  
The duel went on and on. Fenris dodged the Arishok’s blows, the Arishok blocked his.  
  
Isabela could see the elf beginning to grow frustrated. She had frustrated him herself often enough to recognize it, that tension in his shoulders where they had been relaxed before. He got that stance and that expression when he had enough of her teasing - not when he played at being bothered and merely parried her flirtatious advances, a hint of amusement in the quirk of his lips, but the real irritation that made him silent and sullen and hunched over with annoyance. Shortly after that, if someone (probably her) pushed his buttons just one more time, he would explode in a torrent of tevinter swear words and storm away, and they would need to let him alone to cool his head before one of them found themselves with a gaping hole in their chest.  
She held her breath, seeing that snarl on his face. Fenris was getting angry, and he took stupid chances when he got angry.  
  
“Dammit, elf, don’t get killed,” she swore under her breath. “Don’t leave me with these muscleheads and their fucking Qun. Play it smart…”  
  
Suddenly Fenris changed his pattern. Instead of dodging the blows, he attempted to parry with one hand and take a swipe at his opponent’s chest with the other. He realized too late that he could not deflect the Arishok’s swing with only one arm, and was knocked to the ground. The Qunari kicked him, and pulled back his sword for another blow, and the elf only barely rolled out of the way in time.  
  
“Stop!” she yelled at him, but it was too late. He was charging the Qunari again, trying desperately to get in close. He got over the Arishok’s sword, holding it down with his own blade and reaching out his claws to attack. He connected this time, punching his hand through his opponent’s armor, but took a powerful blow to the head in the process as the huge warrior swung his torso around and clubbed him with both arms.   
  
Fenris fell, rolled, and jumped up again. Clearly dazed, he very nearly tumbled right over his own feet and back onto the floor, but managed to right himself. He swayed on his feet, wiped a smear of blood from his mouth, and lifted his sword again. His left gauntlet was shaded with blood now - at least he had gotten something for all his efforts.  _You idiot, you lucky bloody idiot_ , Isabela swore at him silently.

“You fight well,” the Arishok conceded, an unparalleled compliment from the Qunari leader. “You must know you have no hope of defeating me, and yet you struggle. You would have done well in the Qun. But now it is time for this entertainment to end.”  
  
The elf’s eyes flickered over to where Hawke stood conferring with Varric and their other companions. “Don’t count on it,” Isabela muttered, still trying to slip out of her captors' grip. Hawke would not have any other plans. She was fairly certain Hawke would just let them take her, if Fenris lost.  
  
When she looked back at the elf the Arishok was charging him in a running tackle, and he did not leap away nearly in time. The maneuver clipped his shoulder, spinning him around and knocking him out of balance, and his adversary took the opportunity to strike. When Fenris whirled back around to confront him, the Arishok ran him through.  
  
The blade caught him in the chest, cutting through his chestplate like it was nothing. The blow must have sliced right through his ribs, the way it burst through his back. As if it weren’t enough, for the elf was surely already dead on his feet, the Arishok lifted him into the air on his blade, like a speared fish. His agonized cry reached her ears long after its silencing, or perhaps she had gone momentarily deaf, for she could no longer hear the noise of the crowd around her or the Qunari’s shouts of approval. Only that cry, torn from Fenris’s chest as he had once torn men’s hearts.  
  
Her vision narrowed onto that sight, in a long tunnel ending at Fenris’s legs dangling limply from the Arishok’s sword.  
  
That was how she could see what Fenris did next.  
  
His hands came up and grasped the blade that held him, pulling so that he slid horribly down the blade, the weapon jutting even farther through his back. Then they moved again, grasping the Arishok’s enormous hands on his weapon, where they were undefended, where they could not move or else drop the weapon with the full weight of him attached.  
  
He plunged his claws into those hands at the wrists, his lyrium flaring at full power, and a terrible crunching sound issued from them. Then the whole mess plunged to the ground: Fenris, the massive sword that had run him through and the Arishok’s hands still holding it, now severed neatly at the wrists.

Isabela’s hearing must have come back then, for she heard a deafening roar from the crowd around her.  
  
There was so much blood. Fenris nearly slipped in it as he struggled to his feet. Blood spurted visibly from the weapon embedded in his chest, actually arcing through the air from his wound.  
  
There would not be much time for him to do what he must do. With a silent grimace he put both hands on the handle of the weapon and pulled. Isabela could see his fingers tremble with the effort to hold onto the wet hilt and dislodge the blade from his chest -- though she shouldn’t have, she stood nowhere near close enough to see such detail. Somehow she could see it as clearly as if she were standing directly over Fenris as the bulge at his back where the blade had broken through reversed itself and disappeared, and the effort of it brought him to his knees. She could see him clench his jaw and bite through his lip until it bloodied, until at last the Arishok’s weapon fell to the floor and the death-grip of his two severed hands finally released the pommel.  
  
Then Isabela heard Merrill, of all people, screaming at the gushing blood that followed the blade out of him, and the sickening sludgy sound it made against the floor. Fenris fell forward onto his hands, clearly struggling to draw breath, and Isabela closed her eyes then so not to watch him fall. But the gasps turned to cheers and when she looked again the elf was pushing himself back on his feet, holding both his own blade and the Arishok’s, one in each hand.  
  
The Arishok had been staring incredulously at the bleeding stumps at the end of his arms, when he noticed the elf standing once more, now armed with two blades.  “Huh,” he grunted in surprise.  
  
Anyone could see that if the Arishok held out merely a minute, perhaps two, his challenger would have bled to death on his feet. Even with two blades, he was too unsteady at this point to put up a good attack. The Qunari cocked his head and regarded him for a long moment, observing the struggle that the elf put up to remain standing. Instead of waiting him out, the Arishok put down his head and charged him, leading with his shoulders and elbows. Perhaps he was hoping to stamp him out on the floor rather than wait him out at a distance, for the more satisfying victory.  
  
Fenris did not go down so easily beneath the Arishok’s charge. At least, not without bringing the enormous Qunari with him. He pinioned the warrior between the two blades and pulled him off balance. They both went down in a mess of blood and muscle, blades and claws tearing at each other, rolling over each other on the floor, until eventually both were still and silent.  
  
An uncertain moment passed, in which Isabela’s fate hung on a knife’s edge. No one dared to move into the circle to find a survivor, though several Qunari soldiers exchanged glances of indecision on that point. Hawke seemed to be trying to signal her, but Isabela could not be very interested in that. She was still willing with all her might for the elf to get up.  
  
Then his head emerged, his white hair stained entirely red with blood, and the Viscount’s throne room began to roar.  Pulling himself by the arms he dragged himself out from under the Arishok and lifted his opponent’s weapon. With his remaining strength, Fenris hacked off the Arishok’s head and flung it at the feet of the gathered Qunari, where it bounced wetly on the floor.  
  
“Go home,” he instructed them hoarsely and sat down heavily on the floor.  
  
Then Isabela found herself released from her captors’ grip, and she took off at a run. By the time she got to Fenris his eyes were closing, the blood loss catching up to him at last. He slumped on his side, finally releasing his blade, and she could now hear the wet wheeze of his breathing where his lung had filled with fluid.  
  
Isabela pressed her hands against his chest to try and staunch the blood. She could feel broken ragged bone there and he shuddered convulsively when she pressed against it, too weak even to moan. Blood was everywhere - it was all over her, all over the floor, seeping through her boots. It spilled from his lips when he coughed. She tried to hold it in him somehow, with only her hands, but it kept coming.  
  
Justice shone through Anders as he fell to the elf’s side and the power began to flow. The mage was touching him, pulling at him, and Isabela would have shoved him off if she could, but she was herself being pulled away, gently, by Varric and Merrill. “Let Blondie do his thing,” the dwarf was saying.  
  
 _But he would hate that,_ she thought irrationally, even though Fenris could not hate anything at all now.  
  
Then Merrill was wiping her face with the fine cloth she kept tied around her neck. Wiping away blood and tears. “There now,” she said gently, “they’re all leaving, everything’s fine.”  
  
Indeed they were, the Qunari forces were filing peacefully out of the Keep. They left the Arishok’s head behind. To go with the Viscount’s, she thought, and she laughed at that, a little hysterically.  
  
Hawke was surrounded by nobles. He was their leader, everyone knew that. But something strange was happening. They were congratulating him. Even Knight-Commander Meredith was congratulating him. When had she gotten there? Had she come during the duel, or after?  
  
“It seems Kirkwall has a new Champion,” she said.  
  
She wasn’t talking to the elf crumpled on the floor. She never even looked at him. She was talking to Hawke, and everyone was pounding him on the back. He was beaming like a conquering hero, the handsome human without a spot of blood to mar his features.  
  
Fenris of course was in no condition to contest it. Anders was still pouring magic into him, fighting to pull him back from the brink of death. But he couldn’t, could he? Could he fix a hole straight through the chest? Could he put all the blood back in him? There was surely more blood on the floor, on her, than he could have left in him. Even Justice couldn’t fix that.  
  
She glared at Hawke. The Champion. Of course. What good would it be to name a dead Champion? Particularly an elf champion? What could be better for the city than Hawke as its champion? He was a noble himself, of an old Kirkwall family, an inveterate do-gooder, and he was their leader. Fenris followed him, he fought at Hawke’s command. There was sense in it.  
  
What did it matter that it was completely unfair, that it was a lie? After all, nearly everything she did was a lie.  
  
“Where are you going?” Merrill was calling after her, as she was walking to the door.  
  
She was going to wash all this blood off, for starters. She would jump into the harbor, maybe. It was filthy, but she preferred the dirt. She would get on the first ship headed out to anywhere and she would get as far away from Kirkwall as she possibly could. And she would never know for certain whether Fenris had lived or died. What did it matter to her? She hadn’t asked him to save her wretched life.  
  
She pushed through the doors, ran through the crowd of cheering onlookers crowding the Keep, pounded down the stairs that lead to Hightown, and kept on running.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally a one-shot, but I'm toying with a continuation, so I'm going to leave this open-ended.


End file.
